International business transactions frequently lead to the international transportation of goods. The transactions can take place between either related or unrelated business entities, any of whom could be barred from international trade by certain countries or with their citizens and corporations. These goods can be finished products for the consumer market or components for use in manufacture. They likewise can be environmentally sensitive or toxic goods, goods restricted for security reasons, and/or can be packaged in ways that are not acceptable in certain countries. The goods can be subject to export license requirements, import duties, and customs regulations. These issues can arise with each international border crossed by the goods, even goods that are simply in transit through a jurisdiction.
A typical commercial shipment could involve nine different participants, 20 separate documents, 35 customer-vendor interactions and four modes of transport. It could require weeks or months to complete, and can cross numerous international borders. Thus, an elaborate supply chain including manufacturers, distributors, retailers and transportation service providers including freight forwarders, carriers and customs brokers has developed around the world. The resulting global transportation industry is a large and highly complex one, requiring a high level of expertise in a variety of issues that vary from legal jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
In this complex marketplace of services, buyers and/or sellers are frequently relatively inexperienced, lacking knowledge of the wide variety of legal requirements placed on international trade by each country. As a result, a large corporation with thousands of buyers and sellers world wide can have extreme variation in its practices. This potentially leads to noncompliance or inconsistent compliance with the laws of the countries involved in the transaction, excessive delivery times, additional expenses in customs, shipping and brokering, and a failure to recover available tax credits. Furthermore, because transportation procedures are not consistently maintained, little quality control can be exercised in following preferred procedures and hiring better-performing providers. Noncompliance with national laws is a matter of particular importance, as it can lead to both extreme financial penalties and the arrest and incarceration of people ignorantly conducting the transactions violating the laws.
Presently, interaction between importers, exporters and their service providers is primarily conducted via paper, phone and facsimile. The industry lacks industry-based universal formats and standards, and customers use different sets of processes with each service provider. Information from global logistics typically remains disconnected from enterprise systems designed to drive efficiencies across global supply chains.
In attempting to automate and standardize processes, numerous transportation service providers have developed automated processes within their areas of expertise. Such efforts have produced tax services, shipment tracking services, customs invoicing services, duty calculation services, customs classification services, import regulation services, export regulation services, and a large host of other applications. For a customer to take advantage of these applications, each customer (e.g., buyer, seller or related service provider) must realize they have a need to use the package, purchase access to the package, learn to use the package, and provide all relevant information for the package to use. Additionally, because these solutions can be regional in applicability, and because these solutions can be inferior for some types of transactions or locations, while superior for others, their consistent use can be limited in effectiveness.
Related applications are sometimes bundled into a package offering a set of services regarding related subjects. These bundles combine specific point solutions, and therefore adopt their limitations and weaknesses. They each commonly operate without consideration of factors from numerous other areas. For example, packages for estimating costs cannot typically consider the incremental costs incurred in export (e.g., license requirements and restricted party limitations), import (e.g., duties and environmental limitations), logistics (e.g., shipping costs that vary based on a particular customer's pricing agreements), taxes (e.g., customer preferences for claiming “assists,” rights in drawbacks, and other tax related activities) and other such issues. Furthermore, even presuming that all customers could be trained and educated on the use of each such bundle, separate business arrangements and technology connections need to be established and maintained for each bundle, adding to the overall cost of conducting international transportation of goods.
Any automation of the process by a corporation using a firewall is hindered by the complexity of the required interactions. The wide array of automated processes offered by different service providers are not standardized, either in function or communication format. To automate the process, large numbers of holes would need to be programmed into the firewall, which is not desirable from either a cost or security standpoint. Additionally, for each application-to-application interaction, software interfaces would need to be programmed, adding significant time and resource costs. This would be true both for the initial development of such an automated system, and for each modification or update to the system. Furthermore, because these applications all have different standards for the form and format of data, significant risk would exist that data would be mishandled or erroneous data would be passed in at least some of the numerous application-to-application interactions.
Accordingly, there has existed a need for an improved system for interfacing the wide variety of automated processes available for the conduct of international business transactions. Such a system would preferably provide for improved speed, accuracy, legality, consistency and legal compliance. Preferred embodiments of the present invention satisfy these and other needs, and provide further related advantages.